Ours is an age of "Sensitivity Training", of a frantic "Celebration of
Diversity", of a "Multi- cultural" embrace of all moral codes
as equally
valid. It is the prevailing spirit of our times. "Whatever works for me is true." "I
have my
truth; you have yours."
It is precisely this "shrug of the shoulders" relativism in
everything that pertains to morality that Christ confronts and
denounces: "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one goes to the
Father except through Me. If you love Me, you will keep My
commandments. Not everyone who says to Me:
'Lord, Lord!' will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the
will of My Father, he will enter the Kingdom of Heaven."

What Christ taught, His apostles taught: " No murderer has eternal life
in Him" (I John 3:15). "No impure person has any inheritance in the
Kingdom of Christ. Let no one deceive you with smooth words" (Ephesians
5:5-6). "What you have heard from us is not the word of man but what it truly is: the word of God"
(I Thessalonians 2:13).

And what Christ and His Apostles taught, St. Peter's successor, Pope
Benedict, teaches. Like St. Timothy and his mentor St. Paul, he does
not cease to "preach the word in season and out of season," "to
convince, to rebuke, to exhort in all sound doctrine. For the time is
coming" - St. Paul warns us - "when men will turn away from sound
doctrine, and with itching ears will heap up for themselves teachers to
suit their own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth."
(II Timothy 4:2-4)

That time is upon us. Moral relativism, intellectual anarchy reign.
Pope Benedict stands against the world in ceaselessly proclaiming that
there is
an absolute truth in moral matters, that there is a natural
moral law that is unchangeably
rooted in man's very nature. This is a remedial message of which our
"anything goes" culture, with its massive support from our educational
system, stands urgently in need.

Such is the
point that one of America's great bishops, Denver's Archbishop Charles
Chaput, stressed in addressing a tri-diocesan catechedeal congress held
in far western Canada, in Victoria, British Columbia on October 15th
and 16th of this past year. The text of his address was
reprinted in that excellent little paper, The Catholic Servant,
copies of which are available each month free of charge on the tables
just behind the last pews.

Repentance
and Renewal: the Mission of Catechesis By
Archbishop Charles Chaput

Some of you may know the short story, 'The Lottery,"
by Shirley Jackson. If you don't, I need to spoil the ending to make my
point. But I promise the story will still be worth reading.

"The Lottery"
is set on a summer day in a small town in 1940s America. The people are
assembling for a very old annual ritual. The ritual has
something to do with implorations for a good corn harvest-but there's
no mention of any God, and no clergy anywhere in the picture.

Each person in the village lines up to draw a slip of paper from an old
wooden box. Tessie Hutchinson, a young wife and mother, draws a slip
with a black mark.

From that moment, the story moves quickly to its conclusion. The
lottery official gives the word, and the villagers move in on Tessie. And they stone her to
death.

"The Lottery"
is one of the most widely read stories ever published in my country.
And for good reason. It's well told. The ending leaves you
breathless. Teachers like it because it provokes sharp classroom
discussions.

Or at least
it used to.

A few years ago, a college writing professor, Kay Haugaard, wrote an
essay about her experience teaching "The Lottery"
over a period of about two decades.

She said
that in the early 1970s, students who read the story voiced shock and
indignation. The tale led to vivid conversations on big
topics-the meaning of sacrifice and tradition; the dangers of
group-think and blind allegiance to leaders; the demands of
conscience and the consequences of cowardice.

Sometime in
the mid-1990s, however, reactions began to change.

Haugaard described one classroom discussion that-to me-was more
disturbing than the story itself. The students had
nothing to say except that the story bored them. So Haugaard
asked them what they thought about the villagers ritually sacrificing
one of their own for the sake of the harvest.

One student, speaking in quite
rational tones, argued that MANY
cultures have TRADITIONS of human sacrifice. Another said that
the stoning might have been part of "a religion of LONG standing," and THEREFORE acceptable and
understandable.

An older
student who worked as a nurse also weighed in. She said that her
hospital had made her take training in MULTIculturatl sensitivity. The
lesson she learned was this: "If it's part of a person's culture, we
are taught NOT to judge. "

I thought of Haugaard's experience with "The Lottery" as
I got ready for this brief talk. Here's where my thinking led me:

Our culture
is doing catechesis every day. It works like water dripping on a stone,
eroding people's moral and religious sensibilities, and leaving
a hole where their convictions used to be.

Haugaard's experience teaches us that it took less than a
generation for this catechesis to produce a group of
young adults who were unable to take a moral stand against the
ritual murder of a young woman. Not because they were cowards, but
because they had lost their moral vocabulary.

Hauguard's
students seemingly grew up in a culture shaped by practical atheism and
moral relativism. In other words, they grew up in an
environment that teaches, in many different ways, that God is
irrelevant, and that good and evil, right and wrong, truth and
falsehood, CAN'T exist in any ABSOLUTE sense.

This is the
culture we live in, and the catechesis is on-going. But I don't
think this new kind of barbarism-because that's what it is, a form of
barbarism-is an inevitable
process.

It's not
easy to de-moralize and strip a society of its religious sense.
Accomplishing the task requires TWO KEY FACTORS: First,
it takes the aggressive, organized efforts of individuals and groups
COMMITTED TO UNDERMINING faith and historic Christian values.[Read.
Hollywood with the music and entertainment media in general].

Second, it
takes the INDIFFERENCE of persons like you and me, Christian believers.

I want to focus on the
second factor, because it involves us.

Christians in my country and yours-and throughout the West,
generally-have done a terrible job of transmitting our faith to our own
children and to the culture at large.

Evidence can be found anecdotally in stories like Kay Haugaard's. We
can also see it in polls showing that religious identity and
affiliation are softening. More people are claiming that they're
"spiritual," but they have no religion.

Religion is
fading as a formative influence in developed countries. Religious faith
is declining in Western culture, especially among Canadian and American
young people. This suggests that the Church is actually much
smaller than her official
numbers would indicate. And this, in turn, has implications for the
future of Catholic life and the direction of our societies.

What's
happening today in the Church is not a "new" story. We find it repeated
throughout the Old Testament. It took very little time for the
Hebrews to start worshipping a golden calf. Whenever the people
of God grew too prosperous or comfortable, they forgot where they came
from. They forgot their God, because they no longer thought it was
important to teach about Him.

Because they failed to catechize, they failed to inoculate themselves
against the idolatries in their surrounding cultures. And eventually, they
began praying to the same alien gods as the pagans among whom they
lived.

We have the same struggles today. Instead of changing the
culture around us, we
Christians have allowed OURSELVES TO BE CHANGED BY THE CULTURE.
We've compromised too cheaply. We've hungered after
assimilation and fitting in. And in the process, we've been bleached out
and absorbed by the culture we were sent to make holy.

If our
people no longer know their faith, or its obligations of discipleship,
or its call to mission--then we leaders, CLERGY, parents, and teachers have no
one to blame but ourselves. We need to confess that, and we
need to fix it. For too many of us, Christianity is not a filial
relationship with the living God, but a habit and an inheritance. We've become tepid in
our beliefs, and naive about the world. We've lost our
evangelical zeal And we've failed in passing on our faith to
the next generation.

The practical
unbelief we now face in our societies is, in large measure, the
fruit of our own flawed choices in teaching, parenting, religious
practice, and personal witness. But these choices can be unmade. We can repent. We can renew what
our vanity and indifference have diminished. It's still possible to
"redeem the time," as St. Paul once put it. But we don't have a lot
of time. Nor should we make alibis for mistakes of the past.

Sixty years ago, when Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery,"
she could count on her readers knowing what
right and wrong were. She lived in a culture that reflected a
broadly Christian consensus
about virtue and moral integrity. That's no longer the
case.

The culture
we live in today proselytizes for a very different consensus--one based
on political and moral agendas vigorously hostile to Christian beliefs.

A recent article in the New York
Times went directly to this point. It was about a new ad campaign
launched by supporters of homosexual "marriage" in New York. The
campaign features politicians
and Hollywood celebrities making a series of reasonable-sounding
arguments.

One example is from the actress, Julianne Moore. Her ad begins, "Hi,
I'm Julianne Moore, and I'm a New Yorker. We all deserve the right to marry the person
we love."

The New York campaign is misleading and ultimately ruinous to real
marriages and families. But when Christians don't understand the
content or the reasons for their own faith, they have no compelling
alternative to offer.

The points
I've been making are these:

First, either we form our culture, or the culture will form us. Second,right now, the culture
does a better job of shaping us than we do in shaping
the culture.
And third, we need to admit our
failures, and we
need to turn ourselves onto a path of repentance and change, and
unselfish witness to others.

The central
issue in renewing Catholic catechesis has little to do
with techniques, or theories, or programs, or resources. The central issue is
whether we ourselves really do believe. Catechesis is not a
profession. It's a dimension of discipleship. If we're Christians,
we're each of us called to be teachers and missionaries.

But we can't
share what we don't have. If we're embarrassed about Church teachings,
or if we disagree with them, or if we've decided that they're just too
hard to explain, then we've already defeated ourselves.

We need to really
believe what we claim to
believe. We need to
STOP calling ourselves "Catholic" IF we don't stand with
the Church in her teachings-ALL OF THEM. But if we really are Catholic, or
at least if we want
to be, then we need to act like
it with obedience and zeal and a fire for Jesus Christ in our hearts.
God gave us the Faith in order to share it. This
takes courage. It takes a deliberate dismantling of our own vanity.
When we do that, the Church is strong. When we don't, she grows weak.
It's that simple.

In a culture of CONFUSION,
the Church is our ONLY RELIABLE guide. So let's preach and
teach our Catholic beliefs with passion.
And let's ask God to make us brave enough and humble enough to follow our faith to
its radical conclusions. Thanks for your attention. God bless
you.
[Emphasis added].